5 Ideas To Kick-Start Your Marketing Ideas... Or Anything&nbspElse

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

We've all hit that point, either with our own business or perhaps with a client whose business we have gotten close to, where it feels like we've hit a creative dead-end. You know the point: where it feels like nothing is fresh and the ideas have stopped flowing. It can happen anytime we get too close to something.

Ironically, if you were asked about some other business you could probably rattle off all kinds of ideas. So let’s do that. Pick a business, preferably one that is completely unrelated to your business or client's business, to be your "subject" business. Of course, the web makes it easy as you can do this all online, but you could also go to the business as well (if appropriate for your subject). It might be beneficial to pick a business that is local or that you have some basic knowledge of, but not too well, as you may find yourself at the same dead-end of familiarity. Some familiarity may be good or you may spend too much time just learning about your subject.

You can do this for anything... new ideas for marketing, promotional ideas, website ideas, or even new business, product, or service ideas. But don't focus on anything in particular. Look at the subject business as a whole. Think about them and what they provide, who their customers are and their needs, and what solutions they provide and how. You'll find that ideas can come from anywhere... you may broaden out the questions you come up with for your subject to your business, or maybe the actual answer to a question could be an idea for your client, or even how the subject business does something could be put to use by you or your client.

By focusing on something unrelated, you free yourself from everything you know about your business. You can remove some of the pressure that you may be putting on yourself to come up with some great idea for your client. You can focus in on any aspect that jumps out at you when looking at your subject; there are no right or wrong ideas.

To get your ideas flowing, here are just 5 areas to consider:

Opposites Marketing

Think about your client's product or who they serve. Now what is the opposite of that? Say they serve business, then the opposite might be personal or non-profit. Is there some way they could market to either of these other groups? What about you or your client?

Just like keyword research, let’s bring in some modifiers. So with business, maybe you think of big business. The opposite of that is probably small business. Is there a way to specifically market to big or small business? What are the unique needs or interests of either of those groups?

Events and Roles

Are there any events that your subject business serves or could serve? Holidays, trade shows, weddings, or grand openings? Is there any way that you could position yourself to target any special events?

Does the subject business target specific roles? Sales people, mothers, seniors? Could clients position themselves or even develop new products or services for any specific roles?

Encourage The Middleman

The affiliate program is probably the greatest modern example of actually creating middlemen. By creating a middleman approach, you create a one-to-many approach. But it doesn't just have to be affiliate programs. Could your client put together a special product or service that could be presented to a target group who could offer it to their customers? Could you market your services to a target group that serves many who might benefit from your services?

Be The Bigger Picture

In most cases, whatever you or your client does is just one piece of the puzzle. What is the bigger picture that your subject business is a part of? What is the bigger picture that your client is a part of? How could they help serve the greater needs of their customers in regards to the bigger picture? The benefit, of course, is that by making yourself part of the bigger picture, you not only serve your clients, but connect with potential clients. Some easy examples of this would be adding a directory or a resource guide, or creating some tool on our site or a widget that people could add to their site or download.

Create Smaller Pieces Of The Pie

Dealing with the web, we all know that bigger isn't always better; sometimes smaller is where it's at. The web has brought niche to the forefront. Serving a niche may simply be a matter of packaging. Are there any niches that the subject business could target? Would they need to just market specifically to the niche, or do they need to tweak and package their product differently? What niches could you target? How could your client target a niche? Could they take existing products and package them together as a special assortment for a niche? Could you create a special package of services to target a niche doing what you already do or by simply adding a new service?

Hopefully this brought lots of new, creative ideas to mind. Don't be limited to these five concepts, as you can focus in on any element. And don't limit this to just marketing ideas. The idea is simply to free yourself from the box you may have built yourself into by focusing on something completely unrelated, and then using those ideas to kick-start ideas for your own business or client's business.

Placing a large enough body of content into another body of content, will probably still be seen as duplicate, so taking one story and putting it on a page with three other stories, my guess is that the SEs will still see the individual story as duplicate content.

Having 5 paragraphs taken from a body of 10 paragraphs, might or might not be seen as duplicate, but my guess is if the SEs aren't sophisticated enough to see that as dup today, they will eventually be able to. But again, that is a far more complex situation and it may be hard to say whether it really is dup content or not.

I think in all cases, you have to weigh the risks of whether it matters to you whether it is seen as dup content. If placing content on another site is seen as dup content and that site gains the ranking placement instead of you, does it matter?

The smarter move, I think, is to identify the key points of your article, and then write for your audience. In this case, it is less about chopping up and modifying an article to gain placement in two places... it all comes back to your audience.

So in this case, what I write for my site is for a very different audience than the audience I expect to reach here. My site is much more focused on business and website owners. While SEOs may and hopefully will benefit from what they read on my site, they aren't the primary target. The points and concepts conveyed may be the same, but the presentation is different. So these two articles were really written for two different audiences, which is one of the reasons why I didn't feel the need to go into as much detail or the "example" as I did on my own site.

Out of 69.5 million results, the SEOmoz article shows up at number 8 and the article from my site shows up at number 12.

SEOmoz certainly has considerably more authority than my site in the eyes of the SEs (as well as just about anyone else ;) so I certainly couldn't complain on the placement and would feel safe to say that Google considers these to be different enough not to be considered dups.

The original article from which you sourced this info is also great. Now, what happens in a case like this where your article is on youmoz and your own website - is one or the other penalized for duplicate content?

I don't think there will be a problem because the YOUmoz article is more than just an excerpt from the main article, the copy is actually different.

If it was a copy, then the version on SEOmoz would probably win out due to greater authority. If it was an excerpt but still duplicate, that might be harder to say, but I would guess that both would be returned in SERPs, but again, SEOmoz might rank higher again due to authority.

Of course, there isn't necessarily a right or wrong, again it all depends on what makes the most sense overall.

The concern is that you may be splitting off something that could be strengthened on the main domain, like having two separate domains and websites. Better to put all the effort into making your site as strong as possible rather than trying to make two sites strong.

But, it also wouldn't make sense to try to put something that just doesn't relate onto the same site though either. But generally, I think the issue comes down to trying to create mini-sites that really belong together... we sell widgets, and here is our site/subdomain for selling to individuals, and here is our site/subdomain for selling to businesses... when this might be better managed as one site with separate sections for each customer... in the end, you still want to be known as the goto for widgets.

I think too much focus gets put on ranking and SEO for this decision. It really should come back to business sense and alignment.

'Seeing the bigger picture'. this is the area I think most small business I have had contact with directly or indirectly showed some inadequacies. Exposure to the bigger picture ironically , helps you to find a pixel ( oh please it helps the anology ); a niche environment that you can adapt to 'fulfill'.